Now that both the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive are available for purchase, legions of gaming fans and enthusiasts of next-gen technology will have a choice to make. Which headset do they go with? Or, if they can afford it, do they get both? While many of the games and content that shows up on services like steam will be available for both Rift and Vive, some of the content will be exclusive, or that’s the way that it was meant to be in the first place, but in regards to the Rift, there was a third-party app called “Revive” that would allow games to be ported over to the Vive. This was a nice little app for those that may have wanted access to some games that were on Rift only but went with the Vive instead.
In the most recent update to the Oculus Rift, the Revive application was blocked and thus the ports for Rift games over to the HTC Vive platform were blocked as well. That’s bad news for anyone that was hoping to get their hands on some Oculus Rift exclusives, but there is a little bit of a silver lining. There was an update to the Revive app which offers up a partial workaround. The keyword here is “partial,” so this won’t be a complete solution which is important to remember, but it’s better than no solution at all, especially if you’re an HTC Vive owner and were hoping to use Revive or were using it prior to the Oculus Rift update that broke the support.
The software update to the Oculus Rift was released on Friday, so the support for Revive being blocked is still mostly fresh. The reason Revive no longer works is because the Rift update now checks to see if the headset is connected to the Oculus Platform DRM. If you’re looking to bypass the DRM check, you can head over to the new Reddit thread posted by the Revive developers, which have stated that the update to the app should allow the bypass to work for any Unreal Engine game. The developers also note that Unity games are still being worked on and currently can’t be bypassed in the DRM check at this time.